By Nathan Dowdell, 2d20 System Developer
Art by Eren Arik
Complications are a versatile and valuable mechanical tool in the gamemaster’s arsenal in Star Trek™ Adventures, but as with any potent, versatile tool, it can take some thought and some practice to get the most out of them in play. So, I’ve taken the opportunity to put down some ideas on the subject that should hopefully help you—yes, you—find fun and interesting ways to use complications in your games.
(This blog post addresses gamemasters primarily and is written from that perspective.)
WHAT IS A COMPLICATION?
A complication is any problem that crops up during the course of the action: complications are the various issues, challenges, and mishaps that arise while the player characters are adventuring. This definition is broad, but I will provide more clarity as we go. Importantly, complications are relatively small problems: they aren’t the big challenge of the adventure, but rather they’re incidental matters that appear in the player characters’ path along their way.
Complications can arise in a few ways, but the most common include:
- When a player rolls a natural 20 in a task roll, they suffer a complication. If something has increased your complication range, then they may also generate complications on dice that roll 19, or 18, or even lower (core rulebook, page 259). This also applies to NPCs.
- A player may suffer a complication when they use one of their values (or a Directive) negatively.
- You can create a complication by spending 2 Threat.
- A player may suffer a complication as their ‘cost’ when they choose to Succeed at Cost on a failed task.
- If a player character has insufficient Stress to Avoid Injury, they may take a complication as a cost to cover the shortfall.
- When a character negotiates in social conflict, they create complications upon themselves to represent the cost of their negotiations.
- A starship may suffer a complication if it becomes Shaken.
The thing complications have in common is that they all come from the action itself: complications happen because of things. Even creating a complication by spending Threat has come from somewhere: the Threat pool represents the potential for things to go wrong and is filled through the actions of characters on both sides. You’re also encouraged to create traits based on the circumstances already present in the scene: such complications don’t come from nowhere but rather build on what’s already going on.
In practice, complications can take a few different forms, but the most common is that of a trait. You may use a complication to inflict a ‘negative’ trait upon a character, which should relate in some way to the action that the character has just performed or the circumstances of the scene. As normal for a negative trait, this will normally increase the Difficulty of some tasks the character wishes to attempt or makes certain actions impossible, but it could just as easily create an opening or opportunity for another character (a complication might make an enemy’s action easier or even allow them to attempt an action they couldn’t normally try).
However, this is not the only possibility for a complication. With complications that come directly from actions—ones suffered on task rolls, or when you succeed at cost, especially—you can simply translate it into 2 Threat, representing an escalating tension or a problem that hasn’t yet made itself known. You’re even welcome to convert a complication to Threat and then immediately spend that Threat on some other effect, such as calling in reinforcements or some of the narrative or environmental effects described on pages 326–328 of the core rulebook.
Complications may also have specific effects based on other systems the characters are interacting with: in extended tasks or in combat, complications can affect a character’s Impact, the severity of the injuries, or the damage their ship inflicts. Complications can make a timed action take longer than expected. Complications can also be part of any extended consequences (described on page 331 of the core rulebook).
This alone shows the potential versatility of complications. It can also be interesting to have complications—especially in fraught, or time-sensitive situations such as combat—cause brief or immediate problems that limit a character’s options during their next turn. This could be that a character loses the benefit of cover or can’t defend themselves in melee against the next attack because they’ve overextended themselves or left themselves exposed. It could mean that they lose the option to keep the initiative because they left an opening for the enemy. It might mean the use of a Momentum spend against them, such as suddenly being disarmed of their weapon, or letting an enemy take an extra action or keep the initiative for free.
Once again, this all comes back to things you could reasonably do by spending Threat. What the complication creates is a prompt and an opportunity to do these things that’s organic to the natural flow of play.
Creating Interesting Complications
Knowing how and when you can create complications doesn’t really tell you what to do with them when they arise.
The first instinct of a lot of gamemasters is to establish an immediate problem that relates directly to whatever action or situation the characters are in at the time: if the Chief Engineer is trying to restart the ship’s engines, then a complication is a problem that’ll make their job harder during the next step. This isn’t a bad place to start with complications, but it can be limiting, and it does risk stalling the adventure as players get stuck dealing with that problem.
Fortunately, that isn’t the only way a complication can be used. Here are a few options to consider:
- A fun option can simply be to foreshadow some impending problem. This eases the load on you as gamemaster, as you don’t need to impose some immediate obstacle right away, but it also allows you to line up a bigger problem in future. A later complication can be used to turn this foreshadowing into an immediate problem. Such a problem might seem unfair if it had been dropped on the players out of nowhere, but the foreshadowing means that the players are given a chance to prepare or perhaps avoid the problem… and either way, it creates anticipation and helps feed tension.
- Alternatively, you may want to use a complication to make a problem for someone else. This is especially useful when the current situation is focused on one or two characters, as it gives you an excuse to shift the focus to another character for a moment, by giving them something to do. If you’ve already got multiple activities going on simultaneously, then their complications could feed into one another. This can, for example, be a way to get the ship’s doctor involved during ship combat, with complications causing crew to become injured.
- Related to that, changing a problem so that it needs a different approach—whether that approach is taken by the same character or a different one—can shake up a situation. This could also be presented as there being a lack or temporary problem which needs to be resolved before things can progress: for example, if solving a problem requires scanning for or analyzing a specific kind of radiation, a complication may mean that your existing sensors aren’t up to the challenge and need to be recalibrated to do the job.
- On the more benign side of things, a complication could function as a distraction: providing a small immediate problem to deal with that can take players’ minds off of a larger problem they’re struggling with. This is the classic storytelling advice of “when in doubt, have two guys come through the door with guns,” and while it can mean a pair of Klingons beam in with disruptors drawn, it could also mean a dangerous power surge, or any other sudden peril that needs to be fixed now. The point of the distraction is to add a bit of energy to a scene that’s lagging or slowed down. The problem doesn’t even have to be severe, just urgent: if the problem is simple, it could even be an opportunity to bank a little Momentum. If you’re particularly cunning, the distraction could lead to revealing some useful clue or hint about the larger situation.
- In conflicts and other fast-paced situations, momentary issues are a good way to have a complication play out. Declaring that a player overextended themselves on an attack and can’t take cover or defend themselves in melee next turn, or saying that you can’t keep the initiative, or imposing some other brief challenge—such as a technical fault that requires the Restore minor action to repair—is simple, straightforward, and impactful, but doesn’t need to have any lasting impact. This is, of course, ideal in a fast-paced conflict that’s already complex and doesn’t need anything that would slow it down.
Beyond these, the sections on Risks, Costs, and Consequences on page 320 of the core rulebook, and the expanded one on page 33 of the Game Toolkit are invaluable tools for devising different kinds of complications.
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